Comment on Modern Monetary Theory: Musk Edition
BelTheBard@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 days ago
I mean fuck Elon, but y’all know that we could issue people checks right? Like we could do universal basic income and it wouldn’t increase inflation as long as it’s done right. Increasing the supply of money is not the mechanism that causes inflation.
That’s actually complex issue. Trivial model would probably suggest it will cause inflation proportional to the amount of created money. But market behavior is complex and you could get away without inflation if checks were small enough.
The bigger issue would be government creating money directly circumventing Central Bank - that perverts political incentives and is potentially a downhill towards catastrophic collapse
Fiat currency will, by definition incurr inflation. What if money were tied to necessities like a liter of water, kWh of energy, or kilograms of grain?
yeah i proposed the same idea a while ago.
the thing is that scarcity is not gonna last forever on earth, because ultimately the economy will become highly efficient and produce those things in abundance, so the money based on it would be difficult to hold value, i’d say.
but it is a good idea for a mars currency, as long as there’s no abundance of resources, e.g. water is scarce, it holds value.
printing money and donating it to the people would cause inflation but it’s still good.
here’s why:
company A owns $3k, while people B, C, D have $1k each.
now let’s give another $1k to B, C, D. now there’s more money in circulation, name $9k in total instead of $6k. So the dollar is only worth 66% as much as it was before. Let’s calculate wealth of each participant in terms of previous value:
so people have more wealth than before (at the expense of companies)
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 days ago
We’re already straining the resource capacity of the globe, and Americans are an enormous consumer endpoint relative to population size.
Simply issuing more cash won’t create more end products. And when a handful of cartelized retailers control the flow of trade?
Prices are already artificially inflated to accommodate marketing costs and profit. Why retailers continue to raise prices to catch that additional free cash?
DanVctr@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
There is enough food produced globally to feed everyone alive and still have some left over.
The problem is a large portion of it goes bad in the grocery store because no one buys it and it ends up in a landfill.
gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 3 days ago
grocery stores need to produce surplus, otherwise you’re just increasing systemic risks
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 days ago
More broadly speaking, it’s poorly stored and distributed. But yes, we do a miserable job of keeping people fed.
gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 3 days ago
do you actually believe this? how many people you know (directly or indirectly) go unfed?